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“You skipped the one before that.”

“I was at Priya’s, June. I was practically in a different area code.”

“Priya’s is eleven minutes away,” Sloane says, mild, not looking up from the mug she’s drying. “I timed it once.”

And there’s a small beat where the three of them don’t look at each other but somehow confer anyway, the way housemates do, and I can feel the exact shape of the conversation they’re not having in front of me. Which is: Margo’s avoiding Raven House, and Margo doesn’t avoid anything, so what happened at that party. Any second now one of them asks it straight out, and I love them too much to lie to their faces. So I do what I always do. I fill the air before the question can land in it. I know it’s a dodge even as I’m doing it. Self-awareness has never once stopped me.

“Okay, I’m not being weird.” I hop up onto a stool, bright, easy, all of it back online. “I love Raven House. I love your enormous boyfriend, Sloane — he’s a golden retriever in a body that pays taxes. I love the greasy breakfasts and the porch and the whole disaster of it. I’m just busy, genuinely, catastrophically busy, in a way that starts this week and ends approximately never. If I start doing Sunday dinners I will never finish a single practice test, and then I don’t get into law school, and then my mother has me legally disowned in front of the Charleston Junior League. So. Rain check. On all of it. I’ll come when Nationals is over and I’m allowed to have a personality again.”

It works. It always works. Wren snorts, June smiles down at Kevin, and the conversation moves — because I moved it, because moving the conversation is the one athletic event I’d actually medal in.

Only Sloane keeps drying the same mug. And when I catch her eye she gives me a look that isn’t pushing — Sloane never pushes — but lands anyway, quiet and certain. The look of a woman who was standing in a kitchen at six in the morning eight days ago and saw exactly what she saw.

You don’t have to do the bit with me, the look says. The same thing she said out loud in Beau’s flannel with a chipped mug in her hands.

I give her the smallest shrug back. I know. Not yet.

She lets it go. That’s the thing about Sloane — she holds the door and keeps the secret and lets you get there on your own, and it is the kindest and most unbearable thing about her. I’d walk into traffic for her. And I am absolutely not telling her I slept with Theo until I’ve worked out how to say it without my voice doing something humiliating, which at current projections is sometime around graduation.

Eight days. I’ve made it eight days without being in a room with him, and I’m aware that counting the days is not the flex I want it to be. But it’s a system, and systems are how I stay upright, and I have engineered my entire January around not having to look at that man’s stupid, unfairly good face across a Sunday table. It’s working. I feel very calm and handled about all of it, and if that were true I probably wouldn’t need to keep saying it.

I have a seminar in the morning. Ethics and Storytelling, cross-listed, Tuesday–Thursday, which I signed up for because it counts toward my humanities requirement and the reading list looked like exactly the kind of argument-shaped thinking that makes the LSAT easier. A room full of philosophy majors and me. Fine. Good. Safe.

I go to bed pleased with myself, which should have been the warning.

The thing about walking into a classroom you’ve decided is safe is that you walk in relaxed.

I’m early — I’m always early, early is a personality trait I’ve weaponized — with my good tote and a fresh legal pad and the specific optimism of a girl on the first real day of a semester she’s going to dominate.

I dressed for it, obviously, because I always dress for it — the armor goes on before the day does. The good dark denim that fits like it was cut for me, because technically it was. A cream cashmere sweater soft enough to apologize for the weather. The camel coat I fully intend to be buried in. Ankle boots that are absolutely wrong for January ice and absolutely right for everything else. Gold hoops. A swipe of the lipstick my mother taught me is the whole difference between a woman who’s coping and a woman who chose this. My tote has everything in it, including three pens, because a pen will betray you. My hair did what I asked this morning, which felt like a sign. I looked, if I do say so myself, like a girl who has her whole life handled — and looking it is ninety percent of the job.

Ethics and Storytelling meets in one of the nice seminar rooms in the humanities building — the kind with a long table instead of desks, tall windows going gray-gold with morning, a coffee smell coming off somebody’s thermos. I love it immediately. Twelve, fourteen people. A whiteboard with the professor’s name already up — DR. ADLER — in handwriting that means business.

I pick a seat with good sightlines, because old habits, and I square my legal pad to the table edge, and I’m halfway through a very pleasant thought about how this is going to be my easy class, my breathing-room class, the one bright uncomplicated hour in a brutal week —

The door opens behind me, and the temperature of the room changes.

I know before I turn around. That’s the humiliating part. I know the way you know weather — the way you feel a storm in the pressure before the first drop — because there is exactly one person on this campus who fills a doorway like he’s been assigned to it, and I have spent three months pretending I don’t have a sensor calibrated specifically to him. The sensor is going off like a fire alarm.

I turn around.

Theo is standing in the doorway of my safe class.

Six foot four of him, dark hair, that scowl set to factory, a backpack over one shoulder and a coffee in his hand and an expression that says he’d rather be anywhere colder. His eyes go around the room the way mine do, reading it, deciding where the exits are. Then they land on me. And I watch it happen. I watch him see me. I watch the exact half-second where his whole face does the thing mine just did, the recalculation, the oh no not here, before he shuts it down and it’s gone, and he’s just a wall with tattoos looking at me like I’m furniture he didn’t order.

It’s a big campus, I told myself eight days ago, in the shower, building my little fortress. We can absolutely avoid each other.

The universe, it turns out, has a sense of humor, and it is not a kind one.

He crosses the room. Naturally he crosses the room. There are open seats everywhere and he takes the one that puts him diagonal to me, close enough that I get whatever soap he uses — nothing fancy, which is somehow worse — and he drops into the chair like it insulted him and doesn’t look at me.

And here’s the truly unjust part, the part I resent right down to the cell: he looks good. Not curated-good. Not trying — the opposite of trying, which should honestly be illegal. Theo dresses like he’s on his way to split firewood for a widow and then refuse payment for it. A flannel worn soft as a secret, open over a plain thermal henley shoved up to the forearms, because of course the forearms — the man weaponizes forearms. Dark jeans with real wear at the knee, not the kind you pay extra for, the kind you earn. Boots that have been resoled. A canvas jacket older than our entire situationship. None of it is designer. None of it is trying to be, and that’s the part that gets me. My whole look is a thesis I defend every single morning, forty minutes of evidence that I’m fine — and he rolled out of Raven House in whatever was nearest the bed and walked in here looking like a catalog nobody’s allowed to afford.

I am not looking at the forearms.

I’m looking at the forearms. You’re being ridiculous, I tell myself, and keep looking.

“Lost?” I say — bright, pleasant, loud enough for the room, because the room is the point. If we’re loud and awful the way we’ve always been loud and awful, nobody looks twice. “The weight room’s two buildings over.”